


JoJo

by DestielsDestiny



Series: I'm a doctor, not a dictionary entry [2]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Custody Arrangements, Divorce, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Reunions, Sequel, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-08 12:50:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1941777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like most fourteen year olds, Joanna Treadway hates her father. Until she doesn’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Grasping the Stars

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: This is a companion piece to my other 09 trek story, “What’s in a name?”
> 
> Disclaimer: I own nothing.

When Joanna is fourteen she goes through every one of her mother’s closet drawers, looking for what most teenagers would look for-alcohol. She finds something else instead. 

At the bottom of a drawer she’s never opened before, despite the frequency of these searches increasing exponentially over the past three years, she finds something very simple. The truth. The answer to a question she didn’t even know she’d been asking her whole life. 

On the top is a worn legal document, the edges scorched like it was once partly burned with an old fashioned kerosene lighter. Under it is a collection of holopics and paper photostills. Even further down is a box of letters, at least a foot deep. There are hundreds of them, along with vid recorders, recorded messages, and unopened gifts for any manner of holiday. 

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Joanna has always pretened her memory began at four years old, when Mummy married Clay Treadway, and Joanna’s initials changed to JT. She pretends she doesn’t know what her name was before that. She pretends she doesn’t remember saying goodbye to a tall, dark man with a voice like cracked molasses, chocolate eyes an exact template for her own, hands gentle and deft and oh so safe. 

She pretends she doesn’t remember being put to bed to the sound of that molasses slowly thawing, the unidentifiably distinct smell of “hospital” stamped over a shadowy figure that could fix anything. 

Joanna started to pretend she forgot her father when she was five, when Mummy got real quiet and reached for a third glass of wine at dinner when Joanna didn’t call Clay dad. 

Joanna watches the red liquid splash its way inexorably down her mother’s throat, and promptly forgets who she used to be. In that moment, she becomes Joanna Treadway. 

She never does call Clay dad.  
\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Joanna is six, she spends three hours at Grandma Eleanor’s house-it’s the longest they are ever alone together, and Joanna basks in it. In being called Jo, and little Miss, and being able to speak with a proper old southern drawl without upsetting Mummy. So, she gets daring. She asks about daddy. Where he went, if he was coming back. Eleanor didn’t answer her. She took her home less than twenty minutes later, two hours early. Joanna decides she doesn’t like Grandma Eleanor so much after all. 

Eleanor dies a month later, and Joanna never has a chance to revise her opinion.  
\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Joanna is eight, their school does a project “defining your own hero”. Joanna does the project on the Enterprise crew, with one Leonard H. McCoy in the starring role. It’s a masterful project, encompassing hours and years of secret research and painstaking information gathering. 

A week before the project is due, Jocelyn has four glass of wine at dinner. The next morning, Joanna’s project is utterly destroyed. She doesn’t say anything. 

Joanna gets a C- in the section, submitting a hastily done piece about Flash Gordon. It’s the first grade below an A she’s ever received in school, and the fact her teacher doesn’t care enough to comment on or seemingly even notice this marked dip in performance is simply the last piece of evidence Joanna needed to conclude that nobody cared much if she succeeded. So, she stopped trying. 

The day after the project was due, Joanna tore down every hidden stash of information about the Enterprise crew she’d ever looked up. She wouldn’t get any grade above a C- again for over six years. 

===============================================================  
Joanna’s discovery does more than rock her world. It utterly shatters it. When she emerges from that closet she is a different person than the one who went in. Or perhaps she has simply stopped pretending to be someone other than herself. Being the dutiful, loyal, and loving daughter of her mother is the only thing she knows how to do anymore though so, just like with the school project, she does nothing. 

But, she can never take back sitting quietly in that musty closet, peering at a divorce and custody decree in dim lighting, the lies clear as day despite the gloom. When she reads the reason for the final decision, the reasons her mother gave that the Judge bought, her throat closes on a hysterical laugh, her eyes lighting on the wine bottle pocking subtly out from behind a stack of old wool in the far left corner, the red liquid gleaming as bright as blood in the mirky dust. 

=--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
When Joanna is sixteen she is accepted on early entrance to a gifted program at Starfleet Academy, two years of intense studying and preparing finally paying off. Clay signs the parental consent, having turned out to be a fairly passable stepfather, partly due to his willingness to not try to be a father to Joanna, and mostly due to his admittance that Jocelyn does indeed have a problem, albeit one he isn’t able or willing to deal with. 

Still, Clay makes it possible for Joanna to simply slip quietly out of Georgia, if she so choose. Joanna has no doubt Jocelyn wouldn’t even notice at this point, if she ever would have, but she can’t slip quietly away. After twelve years of being silent and obedient, something in Joanna snaps. A small part of Jo peaks out, allowing her to march into the den where her mother is well through her second bottle for the day, watching some mindless soap, and promptly spilling the unopened letters all over the end table at her mother’s elbow. She says one word, “why?” It’s more of an anguished sob, but it makes no difference. Jocelyn’s answer couldn’t have been more damaging if she’d tried: “why should you have him when I can’t?”

That moment brings several startling truths into clear focus for Joanna. One, her mother actually did, and still does on some level, love her father. Two, she’s never known her mother sober. And three, even after everything she still cares what this woman thinks, because somehow the fact Jocelyn acknowledged her existence enough to give her an answer means the world to Joanna. 

It doesn’t stop her from walking away. She doesn’t look back. 

She does take all the letters with her. She has a lot of catching up to do.  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Joanna is thirteen, she speaks to her father for precisely five minutes, down to the second. Speaks is a rather misleading term here, but it’s what the official agreement said. It was all her mother would allow, and it took three of the most skilled diplomats in the galaxy to pull it off. It’s a testament to how good a lawyer her mother still is that she could almost completely successfully red-tape two Vulcans with almost three hundreds year experience between them while being consistently plastered. 

Joanna’s aware of none of this at the time. She only knows she’s wasting her Saturday afternoon when she could be shopping speaking to a stranger. At thirteen, Joanna is still six months off from changing her entire worldview forever, and she spends four and a half of those precious-beyond-her-knowing minutes glaring at a spot over the “stranger’s” shoulder. Part of her, she’ll later admit, was trying desperately to keep pretending, keep forgetting, keep lying to herself to survive. She finally breaks her staring contest with the wall when the stranger utters a word that echoes to the very corner of her soul: “JoJo?” Joanna opens her mouth, shock mixing with horror and grief and wonder and love and denial and agony and a little girl crying out for her “daddy”. 

The timer clicks down and the screen goes black, Jocelyn’s finger firmly pressed over the disconnect button, a blank space ending any possibility of answering her father. Because that’s who the stranger was. She knows that. Even at thirteen, she admits that to herself. 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Joanna is eighteen, the Enterprise returns from its second tour. The preparations rival those carried out on Federation day, the media coverage unlike anything even celebrities and royalty combined can stir up. 

Joanna doesn’t quite have to kill someone to be present at the bridge crew’s initial disembark, but it’s a close thing. She clutches a re-creation of an old project to her chest, old love-worn pictures smashed between her shirt front and the metal casing. She’s never felt more nervous, her third year cadet uniform feeling unnaturally tight. 

The airlock doors swish open, and a group that looks like nothing so much as a press of runway models strides out in groups of two, two, and three. A golden and blond sculpture of pure sex appeal and heroism strides at the front, book ended by two dark figures clothed in sky blue. To say they cut an imposing figure is beyond an understatement. Joanna only has eyes for one of them. 

She takes only one step forward, hesitating, then two steps back. The movement catches several peoples’ eyes, and Joanna feels a gaze slowly slide across time to find her own, fourteen years late. But not too late, somehow.

Nothing, not Grandma Eleanor’s silence, not her mother’s drunken sagas or Clay’s indifferent recitals of wrote facts, not even the treasured photos of a little girl and her Daddy prepared Jo for this moment. 

None of those things ever told her she had her father’s smile.  
\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

When Joanna is nineteen she graduates early from the Academy, and promptly changes her name back to what it originally was, before applying and unsurprisingly being accepted to Starfleet Medical School. She never can quite bring herself to call her father Daddy again, but she thinks she might be ready to try being Jojo again. 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

When Joanna McCoy is twenty three years old she graduates Summa Cum Laude from Starfleet medical, and follows her father into the stars.


	2. Touching the Ground

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leonard McCoy has made a home in the stars, but he never forgets the things that tether him to the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I own nothing.   
> If anyone out there is still waiting for this update, I apologize for the ridiculously long wait. I have no excuses, so here’s some feels? Also, hugs. With Vulcans.   
> Kudos to Oreana, Liliana, and Guardiansaiyan for helping inspire parts of this chapter.

Leo never got to say goodbye to his little girl.

\--

It becomes a theme of Leonard McCoy’s life, the inability to say goodbye to those he loves. Inability, as in opportunity cruelly denied. He never got to say goodbye to his grandmother, who died while he was at school. He couldn’t bring himself to say goodbye to his father when he had the chance, and his mother denied him the chance to say goodbye to her. Jim will one day blink out of existence in an instant, light-years from Bones, with no warning. Nothing will ever hurt more than that final missed goodbye, but one will come close. 

He’s twenty seven, standing on the front porch of a house that had belonged to him up until three hours and twenty three minutes ago. He’s staring at the upper right window, pink curtains flowing in a slight breeze. His throat clogs, a name held back by legalities, tears, and pain. He wants to call out, wants to make a scene, so badly. But he knows it would hurt his little girl. So, he does the hardest thing he will ever do in his life, and walks away silently. 

Deep inside himself, a part of his heart that ceased to beat when he granted his father’s last request slowly dies by inches further. 

 

Ten years almost to the day later, Bones receives a call from the Vulcan Ambassador to earth-Sarek is literally his father-in-law by this point, and perhaps one of the strangest developments of his venturing into a triad bond out in the stars. 

He never gets the opportunity to know the man Sarek was before Amanda’s death, but he suspects it must have been awe-inspiring. 

The rather broken remains of Sarek are focused entirely on his son’s welfare, something which knocks the wind out of Bones’ lungs the first time he feels it secondhand even, stirring old memories that will never get any less painful, no matter how much time passes. As he watches Sarek hold Spock together over their first years in space, mostly across subspace, as he watches him slowly repair parts of Jim he would have sworn were unfixable, that pain softens somehow, tinged with something that he imagines might just be called hope by anyone else.

Sarek’s heart gives out unexpectedly six years after Vulcan imploded, taking most of his heart with it, and Bones spends fourteen hours attempting to reinvent the impossible. All the while, he keeps up a silent litany of curses Sarek might actually be able to hear, he hopes, begging the son of a bitch to just live already, because Spock can’t lose him too. Somehow, “Spock” blends into “they” over the course of the hours, and by the time Bones puts the last newly invented repair to rest and pauses for breath, “they” has solidified into “we”. And Bones has no idea why, but in the moment when he hears that first impossible, strong heartbeat, a part of his own heart he thought had died long ago slowly starts to beat again…thump…thump…thump. 

\--

Bones never actually tells Sarek about Joanna. Jim does it for him, possibly by accident. Bones never finds out. He has as little inkling as his daughter of what the sneaky pointy eared bastards have been brewing for years until the moment Sarek’s image blurs onto his private view screen, taking precisely 12 seconds to inform Bones he has a call from an old friend coming in. He could swear the man was smiling.

The screen fades in and out of blackness, and his first glimpse of his little girl in ten years slowly comes into focus. Leo has never been quite as thankful for another individual in his whole entire life as he is for Sarek in that moment. 

\--  
Joanna didn’t say her first world until abnormally late enough that Jocelyn booked appointments with three different child psychologists while Leo was at work. He doesn’t find out about any of them until Jocelyn tells him to cancel them when Joanna starts talking three days before the first appointment, in typical McCoy sassy fashion. 

In typical Jojo fashion, her first word is Daddy. 

Almost like she was making up for lost time, when Jo starts talking, she can’t seem to stop. She learns four words in her first day, a dozen more by the end of the week. 

Len once mock timed her, peals of giggling making it hard to breathe let alone be serious about checking the stop watch. 

Len finds it tossed carelessly at the bottom of the foot square box of items Jocelyn condescended to leave on their former doorstep. The paper taped haphazardly to the face is mostly mulch from the rain, but the blurred fraction 200/60 is still almost legible. 

Bones thinks he should probably be more surprised when Joanna says precisely nothing on that five minute comm call. The screen clicks to black at the precise moment that Jo looks like she might actually be opening her mouth to respond to Bones’ rather broken inquiry of “Jojo?”, and Leo throws a scotch tumbler through the picture frame on the wall behind the blank screen the second it fades out with a rather cheerful chirp. 

As he watches amber liquid slowly eat away what little writing was left behind by the rain a decade ago, he wonders for the millionth time if maybe his ex-wife was right about him all along. 

\--

Leo never had clear feelings about Clay Treadway either way. Contrary to popular opinion, read Joc and several lawyers, they were never friends. They both grew up in a semi-small 23rd century city in the South attempting very hard to emulate a centuries gone small town atmosphere, so they weren’t exactly strangers either. 

They were also never enemies. 

Bones never really has a conversation with Clay, during the divorce or in the decades after. In fact, they only speak one on one once. 

Bones approaches Clay at Joanna’s Starfleet graduation ceremony. The one that Jocelyn declined to attend. 

It’s hardly a long conversation. It consists of one handshake, and precisely two words. 

“Thank you.” Bones leaves before Clay ever has a chance to respond. 

Or ask what he meant. 

\--  
Bones actually took lessons on how to walk between Spock and Jim. Which sounds rather a lot less ridiculous when the lessons are termed “official ceremonial etiquette” and are on the orders of his future matriarch-in-law on the eve of their triad bonding ceremony, in deference to Spock’s status as the crown prince equivalent of the Clan of Surak. Marginally less ridiculous. Slightly. 

The most confusing thing, and the thing he never gets an answer to, is why precisely he’s in the middle. Spock makes much more sense, especially considering the context. 

At least outside the bedroom. And Bones really, really likes to maintain the illusion that the matriarch of the surviving Vulcan people is entirely ignorant of who’s the Top in his personal relationship with his husbands. Bondmates. Thy’la(s?). Whatever. 

It might all bother Bones slightly less if that isn’t the way they always walk after that. Seriously, whether they’re walking to the commissary or crossing a red carpet or signing a treaty or meeting royalty, Jim and Spock forever bracket him like mismatched gold and blue bookends. At least at official events the contrast is less obvious, since they’re all in grey.   
At this point, Bones will take what he can get. 

Considering they’ve been married for almost a decade when they shuttle down for the official ending of their second tour, which everyone makes way too much fuss over because like those 21st century bad movie franchises Jim is so very fond of, they’re already contracted for a third go around, Bones really has no explanation for how Jim ends up in the middle when they walk out the doors into roughly a million flash bulbs. 

Spock merely stiffens subtly about 2.4 seconds before the doors swish completely open and literally uses Bones’ shoulder as leverage to somehow swing around to Jim’s other side at precisely the same moment that Bones feels a brief, familiar, warm brush across their shared parental bond. Jim’s grip on their hands is enough to tell Bones that he felt it too. 

Somehow, they all look completely composed when second 2.5 arrives. 

Then they walk out the doors, and Bones doesn’t need an explanation anymore. 

\--  
Spock once told Bones that his smile was the reason he fell for him. They’re on some rock called Omicron Ceti some number he totally wasn’t listening enough at the briefing to ever recall and there are spores involved and Bones is more than enough of a scientist to doubt the validity of things said under the influence of anything that euphoria inducing but Spock is a Vulcan and Sarek somehow arranged to have one thousand seven hundred and one chocolate hearts delivered to the Enterprise bride on the first April fools after they all started dating and Bones is totally holding Spock to every word of that.

It’s hardly the first time Bones has heard that he has a nice smile. Joc loved to tease Leo about his smile. Eleanor once called him angelic. David kept a framed picture of the two of them on his desk, grinning like fools and holding a really big fish. 

Len burns it along with most of his office the day his father dies. Never let it be said that he didn’t give Joc lots of kindling to ignite the fire of their divorce. 

Bones only has one picture of his little girl. It was taken on her first Halloween. Jojo hated her pumpkin costume something fierce, so naturally the picture features a world class pout. It’s the cutest frown Len’s ever seen. 

There are almost a million pictures of Leonard McCoy’s fifteen years in the making reunion with his daughter. Most of them focus on the rather conspicuous presence of a rather large number of Vulcans. Or rather, the rather universe freezing phenomenon of Vulcans hugging. Hugging humans. And each other. Multiple times.

The shot that most of the world freeze frames on in years to come though is before that. 

Probably a billion people realize that Joanna McCoy has her father’s smile before the man himself even knows what it looks like. 

In retrospect, that might explain more than a few of the hugs. 

\--

Bones is the fastest crewmember on the Enterprise. He has the records to prove it. He’s even faster than Spock. He’s never looked up statistics on the physical endurance of starship CMOs, but Scotty re-revolutionizes transporter technology in the second year of their first tour, which makes the whole thing academic anyway. 

If he was around to ask, David McCoy could have told the world that his little boy was always fast. That he ran before he could walk. 

If anyone ever asked her, Jocelyn could have told everyone that she fell in love with Leo the day he almost ran her over on the way to class. He outran the track team. Which she was on. In the middle of a practice for state championships. They had three Vulcans and a Klingon in their squad. 

Nobody ever really comments on Bones’ speed until the day he literally blurs slightly before a camera lens crossing a distance of almost a 20 meters in less than 2 seconds.   
\--  
When Jojo was little, she used to take a running tackle into Bones’ arms at the end of the day. She once impacted hard enough to bruise four of his ribs. 

Bones grabs his little girl at a dead run three days after her eighteenth birthday. The black and blue state of their rib cages the next day is only partly due to the square object pressed painfully between their intertwined bodies. Bones can’t remember when anything last felt this comforting. This right. 

Spock is the only person who would ever dare to call Bones loquacious, and Bones would totally call bullshit if he ever actually tried it, but his choked out words are hardly in danger of damaging that reputation. 

“I missed you Jojo.”

Still, Joanna’s response is hardly any wordier. “I missed you too Dad.”

Guess she gets that from him too. 

\--  
Vulcans are surprisingly good at hugging. Bones is actually rather well acquainted with that fun fact by this point in his marriage, and it has nothing to do with Spock. 

Sarek is surprisingly tactile. He probably hugs Bones more before he leaves sickbay that first time than David McCoy did in the last ten years of his life. 

Bones would find this all harder to adjust to if Spock didn’t wallpaper in pictures of Sarek holding his family. Which grows by two a couple years after it shrank by one. 

He would find it odder if Jim’s face didn’t imitate several currently being eaten by a blackhole suns that feature prominently in those pictures every time Sarek carefully wraps his arms around one of his sons. Or all three of them at once. The man really isn’t picky. 

Bones frames four different copies of a newscaster’s snap of Sarek carefully wrapping his arms around his very human granddaughter in front of the entire Starfleet press corps, a million flashbulbs creating a backlight glow stronger than a dozen suns. 

Jim uses the picture of the five of them octupussing incredibly not awkwardly, for precisely 19.23 minutes according to Spock, as his official wallpaper. For the entire ship. Permanently.

It isn’t until Bones is standing in Sarek’s carefully molded home on New Vulcan, gazing at pictures of his little girl grinning like the sun amongst pictures of Amanda Greyson’s gently smiling brown eyes, that it occurs to him that their family has always really been six.   
\--

Joanna finished medical school a week after her twenty third birthday. Her father is the one who pins the Caduceus on her uniform collar. 

Her salute is sharp enough to be nearly audible slicing through the air. 

Her words are quiet enough to stir the air less than the salute. 

“Thank you Daddy.”

It’s still the most beautiful thing Bones has ever heard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is for Leonard Nimoy. You are greatly missed Sir.


End file.
